“He will not be pleased. He did ask that I remain...” He appeared somewhat uncomfortable at the obvious meaning of that. That I was a child that needed watching over.
“What am I to tell him if he returns and finds ye gone?”
“You could always tell him that you failed in your attempts to dissuade me from leaving, or...” The idea was suddenly there.
It was splitting hairs over the matter, as I had once heard someone say. It had worked. Not without a bit of an argument, but it had been a convincing argument.
“You may accompany me,” I suggested. “Therefore, I will not be alone.”
“Oh dear, Miss Montgomery. You have put me in a very difficult position...” He looked at me as I opened the door to leave.
“I will get my coat and accompany ye. I must lock the office as well.”
I smiled to myself.
He was still lamenting the decision to leave as we found a driver at the edge of Parliament Square.
“How will I explain this to Sir McQuarrie when he indicated that he needed the information I was searching for?”
“I will help you when we return,” I announced.
“You would do that?”
“Of course, in exchange for your silence over the fact that we left the office in the first place.” That was upon the condition that we did return before Munro.
“Agreed,” he said, and locked the door to the office.
I would never have beenable to find Morriston Place on my own. Simon was familiar with that part of Old Town and provided directions to the driver.
“Sir McQuarrie had me serve a summons very near there on a past case,” he explained as we crossed the Royal Mile at Princes Street and continued into Old Town at the Cowgate.
“Most cases are usually quite boring, but this was most fascinating.”
As we continued along Cowgate, he told me about the case Sir McQuarrie was given. In the process of the investigation, charges were brought against a man for defrauding the Scottish Government and charity organizations that assisted those who were impoverished and destitute.
It seemed that the man originally appeared before the court in response to charges that he was arrested for robbery, where it was revealed that part of his scheme was to dress as a woman and then solicit men and rob them.
Not an original idea, I thought, considering some of the stories I remembered from when I worked atThe Church. However, a subsequent arrest revealed that he had apparently added extortion to his list of offenses. He claimed, dressed as a woman once again, that a notable person was the ‘father’ of his unborn child.
One thing led to another, the scheme was revealed when the man hired a private inquiry agent to investigate the poor ‘woman’ and discovered that she, or rather he, was actually a man, including a pregnancy bump as part of his costume.
“It was all most entertaining,” Simon commented, as the driver pulled to a stop at the corner of Cowgate and Guthrie Street.
He pointed out the tenement where he had served the summons as we rode past.
“Morriston Place is the next street over,” Simon called out to the driver.
Or had been at one time. It was now reduced to a pile of charred rubble as the driver pulled to a stop.
I stepped down from the coach, even as I felt a sharp stab of disappointment. Strange as the experience was when the address appeared in that letter, I had hoped to learn something from it.
“What do you know about the place?” Simon inquired as we stared at what was left of the tenement.
How to explain that I knew absolutely nothing about it, except for the address and that name that had appeared in that letter?
I shook my head.
“It was information that I received.” That seemed the easiest way to explain it.
